Paul Burnett, an Adobe Flash video expert and founder of Multimedia Art Design (MAD), sees a revolutionary change in the next few years in the way we communicate and interact through online video.

Like many professional creators, Burnett uses the powerful and flexible architecture of Adobe Flash CS3 Professional to create rich media experiences that combine video, audio, data and graphics together with interactive user control.

“I’ve been using Adobe Flash for just over 10 years, but it is the advances in the last 12 – 18 months, that will revolutionise what video designers will be able to do and what users will be able to experience,” says Burnett. “Suddenly, audiences will no longer be passive receivers, but instead they will be engaged interactive users”. Burnett recently completed an
on-line interactive video for the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, where, by the use of Alpha channelled video, users control and interact with athletes. Users can interact with a swimmer, a netballer, a rower and a runner by manipulating the video as it plays.

As Burnett noted “With Adobe Flash you can treat video as another object so that the end users can control what happens. You can do all the things you normally do with objects such as animating them, twisting or rotating them, or use run-time effects. This takes video to a new dimension.”

Burnett believes that another exciting development is that video doesn’t have to appear in the traditional rectangular shape.

“Adobe Flash is the only online video format that supports alpha channel, so that you can create any shape you want for your video. You can also cut out background so that your video could, for example, be a person walking across the screen with a background of the application, or your video could be wrapped around a pencil that a user can pick up and manipulate,” says Burnett.

“In the AIS project we filmed four athletes from the AIS against green screens. The hardest was the swimmer, who we had to film swimming without water. We filmed him in two sections. Firstly, from the waist up, standing up and ‘swimming’ with his arms, and then secondly from the waist down, hanging him from the ceiling so we could film his legs kicking.”

Burnett then used Adobe After Effects to join the two videos together. The video was then taken into Adobe Flash. “By using ActionScript, the user can move their mouse over the swimmer to create ripples in the video. We also filmed the athletes against a green screen as they introduced each section. We then alpha channeled them and incorporated them into the Adobe Flash interface.“

Burnett comments that the combination of ActionScript 3 together with Adobe Flash Player’s support of H.264 video compression and AAC+ digital audio compression will mean there will be faster processing and smaller file sizes leading to smoother, higher quality and more realistic output. He believes this will result in an explosion in full screen online video. Burnett also sees a revolution in the field of 3D video. With ActionScript 3, video designers can now start to create 3D objects using Papervision3D, an open source 3D engine for Adobe Flash.

'You can create a 3D space such as a room which might have a television playing video in it. Users can look around and move around the room and even do things such as change channels on the TV. Incorporating video into a 3D environment prompts the user to interact and so you truly engage that user,” says Burnett.

'In the AIS project, we wrapped the videos of the athletes onto the faces of a cube. The user can spin the cube around and click on it to jump to a particular section. Although the same result could be achieved by providing the user with static buttons, the cube provides a much richer and more engaging experience. Each section also contains small pieces of video which loop and fade in and out to create an organic and dynamic interface.”

Burnett is quick to point out that the technology should support the experience and not just be technology for technology’s sake. But he believes that it is the ‘wow’ factor that will initially get people to the websites. He believes that people then talk and viral marketing takes over. It is then up to the video creators to ensure that they keep the audience engaged in a manner which supports their message.

Burnett predicts that marketers who are quick to adopt such innovative, interactive video techniques will find that they retain users for longer and provide a more satisfactory user experience which increases the chances of their message being delivered.

Burnett also believes that the launch of Adobe Flashlite 3, will further develop the market by enabling users to access engaging experiences like web content and streaming video (FLV) from their mobile and consumer electronic devices.

Another exciting development in video delivery is the fusion of TV and the Internet. UK based television and radio provider, the BBC, has recently adopted Adobe Flash Player software to make its free catch-up TV service, BBC iPlayer, available as an ondemand streaming service across multiple platforms.

The BBC believes that Adobe’s video solutions will revolutionise how it creates and delivers content to audiences in the digital age. It plans to make its rich-media content accessible to the widest possible audience in the UK by the end of the year.

Check out the following links for some cool stuff in online video:

AIS Discover the Champion Within

PaperVision3D

Nike and Big Spaceship